Heading off with a Journey in mind

Lancaster’s Dukes Theatre will later this month stage a show that really gets inside your head.

A Journey Round My Skull is a love story that seeks to put its audience under the brain-surgeon’s knife.

The breathtaking production uses recordings taken on surgical wards to produce a 3D experience of awake brain surgery.

During the show, on February 25, the audience will be invited to wear wireless headphones and become the patient.

But this is not a documentary about brain surgery.

It’s the backdrop to a love story which transports the audience on a romantic rollercoaster ride into the streets of continental Europe and onto the tracks of a ghost train via a row over profiteroles.

With poetic storytelling and extraordinary sound design, A Journey Round My Skull was inspired by the book Utazás a Koponyám Körül, the perversely funny medical memoir of Hungarian satirist Frigyes Karinthy, who had a brain tumour removed during experimental surgery in the 1930s.

The audience effectively takes the role of the patient, and a neurosurgeon explains what is happening to them.

We have a brain tumour, it’s pressing on our left temporal cortex, affecting memory, mood and prompting wild hallucinations.

The twist, is our neurosurgeon is also falling in love with us. And we are falling in love with her...

This multi-sensory experience, which enjoyed a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is recommended for anyone aged 12 plus and there will be a post show talkback free to ticketholders.